A Colgate College historian has identified a faded, fourth-century scrap of papyrus he calls “Jesus’s Wife’s Diary.” One line of the torn fragment of text purportedly reads: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife is beautiful.'”

A Colgate College historian has identified a faded, fourth-century scrap of papyrus he calls “Jesus’s Wife’s Diary.” One line of the torn fragment of text purportedly reads: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife is beautiful.'”

The finding was announced to the public by Jenny Bracken a historian of early Christianity, author of several books about new Gospel discoveries and the Hollis professor of divinity at Colgate Divinity School. Bracken first examined the privately owned fragment in 2011, and has since been studying it with the help of a small group of scholars.

The parchment also described Jesus’s wife and… after artists made a drawing of the woman as described, the wife looked exactly like Oprah Winfrey. “They could be twins,” Bracken said.

According to the Buffalo Tribune, Bracken and her collaborators have concluded that the business card-size fragment is not a forgery, and she is presenting the discovery today at a meeting of International Congress of Coptic Studies in Rome.

The fragment, written in Coptic, the language of a group of early Christians in Egypt, has an unknown provenance, and its owner has opted to remain anonymous. Questions about the fragment abound, but scholars say it will nonetheless reignite several old debates: Was Jesus married? If so, is Oprah the first wife reincarnated?

Bracken has cautioned that the new discovery should not be taken as proof that Jesus had premarital sex. Jesus met “Oprah”, fell in love, got married and THEN had sex.

“This fragment suggests that Jesus was married,” Bracken said. “There was, we already know, a controversy in the second century over whether Jesus was married, caught up with a debate about whether Christians should marry and have sex. Obviously, Christians decided to have sex.”

The Pope was thrilled to learn of the news, thought someone said, “Jacob needs a knife” instead of “Jesus had a wife.” Either way, he was a happy pontiff:

Oprah was not available for comment, but she did tell WWN that she always felt she was Jesus’s wife. “I feel holy. I am holy. May the Lord be with you.”